Popful Mail: Magical Fantasy Adventure (1994). Play online

Summary

Popful Mail: Magical Fantasy Adventure (often just called Popful Mail) feels like a missing link between classic platformers and early Metroidvania titles. You can jump, slash and swap between three wildly different heroes—Mail the blade‑wielding bounty hunter, Tatt the polite magic apprentice, and Gaw the fire‑breathing blue blob—anytime outside cut‑scenes, which adds a tactical layer absent from most 2‑D action games. The Sega CD port boosts the experience with full Japanese voice clips, around 2½ hours of spoken dialogue and slick animation, all synchronized to mouth movements with clever waveform analysis. Aside from basic health bars, each character carries a handful of weapons (sword, dagger, boomerang, staff, fireball, claw) and can equip items that affect damage and status. Save slots are plentiful, but you can’t save mid‑dialogue, so planning ahead pays off. The difficulty was cranked up for the North American launch, making every boss fight feel like a true test of timing and weapon choice.

Storyline

In the unnamed fantasy world of Popful Mail, a prologue recounts three fallen gods of darkness—Morgal the Lord of Beasts, Necros the Master of War, and Ulgar the Overlord—who were sealed in a floating tower after a great war. Only three warriors—an elf, a human and a dwarf—survived to tell the tale.

The heroine, Popful Mail, is a female elf bounty hunter. She first confronts the golem‑maker and technomancer Nuts Cracker in a forest, defeats him, but his body escapes and the bounty post refuses her head because they only accept duplicates. A poster then offers a 2,000,000‑gold reward for the wizard‑turned‑criminal Muttonhead, sending her deeper into the woods on a far more dangerous quest.

Along the way she meets Tatt, a magician and former apprentice of Muttonhead; Gaw, a small winged purple creature who joins in the Caves; Slick, an elf friend with bad jokes and homemade bombs; and Glug, a kindly dwarf with hinted mental issues. The plot weaves her pursuit of these foes with the looming threat of the Masters of Evil’s ancient seal, promising a perilous and rewarding adventure.